Jewish history

Give sorrow words

THIS book begins in 1743, when the 14-year-old Moses Mendelssohn arrived in Berlin to seek an education. He would become celebrated as the German Socrates and the Jewish Luther. It ends nearly two centuries later when another luminary, Hannah Arendt, left Berlin after the Nazis came to power. These two vignettes frame Amos Elon's elegiac book. They also suggest the aspects of modern German-Jewish history that really engage him. Mr Elon wants to trace “the fates and ideas of a number of interesting, mostly secular, and often very appealing people”. They were, he adds, not “representative” but “emblematic”, a distinction that some may find elusive.

Having begun with Mendelssohn in Enlightened Germany, Mr Elon moves on via the salonnières, Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin, to the politically engaged writers of Young Germany, Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne. An exceptionally thoughtful chapter then looks at Jews for whom the 1848 revolution provided a political stage. The collective biography thickens as Mr Elon turns to the extraordinary talent that flowered in newly unified Germany in the fields of literature, art, music, journalism, philosophy and science. This is the story of Weimar culture in waiting. The author writes the poignant end of that story in his final chapter, but not before a more-in-sorrow-than-anger reminder that Jewish intellectuals fully shared the German war fever of 1914.

Mr Elon makes familiar material absorbing with his deftly interwoven life histories (helped by the fact that so many of his principal characters were in fact related to each other) and his generous use of direct quotation from letters and diaries. Although sometimes shaky on the larger political history, he gives a good sense of the institutional settings that made a difference. The reason why so many educated Jews turned to journalism, criticism and bookselling, for example, was because they were barred from holding civil service or university posts.

But this collective portrait, undeniably attractive, remains very partial, devoted to the minority of the minority that stood for cultural, political and entrepreneurial modernity. One of the ideas that recur in the book is education as a form of secular belief, but there is little on religion itself. Mr Elon quotes Heine's sardonic description of Reform Judaism as mock turtle soup (“turtle soup without the turtle”), but he wastes little time on that phenomenon and even less on orthodoxy. A note refers to Peter Gay's provocative plea for a history of the “stupid Jew”, of the ordinary businessmen, the shopkeepers and professionals whose lives belied the stereotypes of cleverness. Mr Elon is not particularly interested in this, although where he lowers his gaze to introduce a few statistics or talk about everyday matters, such as changing one's name or putting up a Christmas tree, it gives his book a valuable extra dimension.

Despite the rarefied perspective, Mr Elon's big picture is persuasive. He neatly captures the idea that Jews had to earn emancipation with his comment that they were “on probation”; and throughout the book he adroitly uses conversion (mainly to Protestantism) as an index of the continuing constraints that Jews felt in post-emancipation German society. At the same time, perhaps with right-wing Zionist critics in mind, he offers praise for a multicultural version of assimilation and warns readers not to write off the critical blue-print for self-improvement simply as Jewish self-hatred.

“The Pity of It All” succeeds, finally, at one of the hardest tasks of all. The dust jacket calls this a book that tells the story from the beginning, not the end. It's a fair claim, for one of the greatest achievements of Mr Elon's humane and lucid account is his ability to balance the open-endedness of history as it was lived by his characters and the various foreshadowings of catastrophe that are now evident to us.